Coinciding with today’s release of this journal’s fifth issue, we also look at Kevin Gilliam’s mastery of verse-form; his sense of musicality in writing poetry of place. Twice short-listed in the prestigious Australian Book Review Poetry Prize (back in 2005 & 2008), he has figured prominently in a wide range of other major poetry awards since. This year, Kevin has been the judge himself in the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize, in Perth…
‘dolloped out there’ – a villanelle of place, experimental & reverberative
Like all dedicated writers, prize-winning West Australian poet Kevin Gillam pays considerable attention to self-identified components in developing new work, not least — for him — by regularly treating a sense of place as one potential point of focus.
At times such writing is not only grounded in a specific geographical location, but also in a traditional poetic form, whether that be the likes of the villanelle we will look at closely here, or a sestina such as ‘seven dreams round’ (winner of the KSP poetry competition).
Rather than necessarily writing in free verse outright, on other occasions Gillam experiments with verse forms of his own devising, as he readily discloses.
In the process, questions of cadence and syllabics can become foremost among various considerations, as he seeks to imbue his work with a distinctive quality of voice, often calling into play his background in classical music when developing further poems.
Formerly, after all, Kevin was Director of Music at the prestigious Christ Church Grammar School in Claremont, having been a cellist with the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra: indeed, he is still an instrumental teacher in retirement, while continuing to attend an annual music camp at Albany which helps to prompt new poetry.
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Let us look closely at a haunting piece that brings a range of elements to the forefront: called ‘dolloped out there’, it takes the form of a villanelle, yet it shows a commitment throughout to experimenting with characteristics expected in that beloved Western poetic sub-genre, with Gillam avoiding full, regular repetitions of key lines in set patterns —
dolloped out there
islands, three, dolloped out there,
silent on horizon, hint of bend where
yes, you walked one, bled on one, once
flinty and hard as truth,
Michaelmas, Breaksea, Mistaken,
three islands, dolloped out there
barefooted, late autumn, off the
dinghy, all map and scheme, blind to sense,
you bled on one, walked one, once
remainders, middle pinned by lighthouse,
eye closed over now, drab reminders
dolloped out there, islands, three
t’was rock and hell’s arc of scree,
at the unseen tip, in Southern’s wash
you walking, you bleeding, once
half round, turned back, spume and swell, soles
gashed by shell, by granite, one gull in watch
at you walking, bleeding, back, on one of
three, islands, dolloped out there
Kevin Gillam
***
This resonant piece has appeared in a range of contexts previously.
As shown via the link below, it was accorded strong recognition as poetry of place through being published online by Edith Cowan University, as part of a significant project titled Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language (Volume 7, Issue 1, Ecotones as Contact Zones, April 2016:
https://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=landscapes
Subsequently this well-travelled poem-of-place appeared in hard copy both in Kevin Gillam’s own fourth collection of poetry The moon’s reminder [Ginninderra Press, 2018]; and then again in a GP anthology called Mountain Secrets [2019].
As an aside, the latter’s compiler Joan Fenney showed editorial flexibility in regarding the islands featured in Gillam’s poem as mountains offshore, in effect: they are located in King George Sound — traditionally, Mammang-Koort — at Albany, in the south-west.
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Notably, however — as a further side issue — the provenance of this villanelle (at least in relation to its title) is complicated by yet another previous appearance elsewhere.
The phrase ‘islands dolloped out there’ also happens to conclude the first stanza of an an otherwise distinct poem — called ‘equal lengths’, likewise by Kevin Gillam — which gained significant affirmation too, being published in Meanjin (in Autumn, 2015) not long before the dolloped image was recycled in our villanelle, toward the Landscapes project:
https://meanjin.com.au/poetry/equal-lengths/
The opening verse of this associated piece reads as follows:
soothed and aching. until then. make the music they should.
yes, heard it fall. though blinkered. obeying the rules of
too few. by the tin foil sea. islands dolloped out there.
While not involving set repetitions of phrasing across a whole poem, this kindred piece shares similarities — noting short phrases broken up by heavy punctuation (enough to have a staccato effect), again readers will find offshore islands giving a sense of place.
Some may even feel this use of full stops is awkward, when one would normally employ commas: no capital letters appear straight afterwards either, with all text in lower case.
Like the larger part of a villanelle, this earlier poem ‘equal lengths’ is set up in tercets of a kind: an ending giving the titular notion of ‘equal lengths of hope’ has been preceded by an associated idea ‘measures something like’ which closes out its second-last verse.
Most deliberately, full stops have been employed at the end of all previous stages, only to have the last stanza be left to float, without any punctuation at its finale, despite that being the very point where readers might have expected another ‘period’ most of all.
As within the villanelle which occupies our central focus, Gillam pointedly uses clipped phrasing over this whole Meanjin piece, building tension, creating discord, striking links.
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In experimenting with the villanelle form in ‘dolloped out there’, Kevin Gillam is bold enough to make departures away from precedents that require the development of three-line verses which adhere strictly to a set of repetitions, as laid down by tradition.
Such convention (in case it is helpful to explain the ‘rules’) sees the opening line in such a poem go on to reappear by concluding both the second and fourth stanzas, before also becoming the penultimate line in the quatrain which brings the poem to a close.
The final line of the first stanza likewise recurs, ending up as a closer for the piece as a whole, after finishing off each of the third and fifth verses beforehand.
While likewise following a set rhyming pattern, traditionally a villanelle must always span across six verses and be nineteen lines in length — at their most powerful, repetitions can prove to be haunting, growing all the more emotive by dint of working cumulatively.
In a landmark text published by Norton, offering guidelines and exemplars spanning a broad range of Western verse-forms, Mark Strand and Eavan Boland offer an uncompromising appraisal of the limitations of the villanelle, however: ‘… the form refuses to tell a story. It circles around and around…’
These Norton editors — as foremost poets themselves — recognise its pastoral roots, crediting this Italian-derived sub-genre (later embraced by the French) with resonating unforgettably through ‘powerful recurrences of mood and emotion and memory’.
In what they signify as a modern-day assessment, Strand and Boland end with another thought-provoking observation, again pulling no punches in linking up with their starting-point: ‘Its repeated lines, the circularity of its stanzas, become… a repudiation of forward motion… Each stanza of a villanelle, with its refrains, becomes a series of retrievals.’
[The Making of a Poem — A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, Norton, New York, 2001, p. 8.]
Tellingly, the North American writer Strand and his Irish-born colleague Boland ignore a universally applauded example of the modern villanelle within their ‘Close-Up’ appraisal — Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ — opting instead to give a glowing evaluation of US poet Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’
[Norton, ibid, pp. 19-20].
In compiling an earlier anthology — complete with notes for use in schools — George Macbeth (a mid-Twentieth Century English poet) has not shied away from flagging potential dangers inherent in sheer repetition within the Welshman’s iconic villanelle:
This poem is about the death of Thomas’s own father and is an outburst of protest against the inevitability of death. Its main strength lies in the first three and the last four lines. One has a slight sense that the villanelle form has compelled Thomas to elaborate unnecessarily in the central four stanzas.
[Poetry 1900 to 1965, Longman English Series, London, 1967, p. 253.]
Such a charge could not rightly be made against Kevin Gillam, since he manages to generate impact, throughout, as a result of using carefully crafted variations in wording, as against verbatim repetitions of set lines, such that emphasis can shift, little by little.
Whereas the strictest purists might demur, Kevin Gillam’s revisionist approach remains respectful towards tradition, at heart, while opening up helpful possibilities as well.
Indeed, he could not claim to be alone among contemporary poets who pursue new ways forward, breaking moulds to enliven traditional forms resonating around echoes.
‘dolloped out there’ continues to achieve telling effects built upon haunting repetition, while even allowing a sense of story to develop as well, through finding freshness of perspective or accent in offering variations in phrasing which adapt refrains; gaining momentum as a result, emotively, thematically and even in a narrative-based context.
In retaining respect for crafted patterns, yet re-tuning reverberations, potentially Gillam catches the ear of contemporary readers more attuned to pace and change: current-day audiences may be less patient with text if slow in development, founded on reiteration.
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This piece of genre-based poetry of place is made all the more striking by integrating a further level, depicting troubled human interaction with a challenging physical locale.
Even though the body of water in question gives a home to other islands too, having three of them named explicitly is ominous in effect, when the functional service which these landforms offers to shipping within King George’s Sound (as natural breakwaters) is overridden by a sense of danger, within this poem, as a consequence of human error.
Absorbing a message which is ‘flinty and hard as truth’, readers can readily gather that this trip to the islands ‘once’ in younger days was fraught with hazard, thanks to having been ‘blind to sense’ — like one island, sadly ‘mistaken’ — in believing it was safe to venture ‘barefooted’ across ‘rock’ and ‘scree’ which could only leave ‘soles’ of feet ‘gashed by shell, by granite’. (By this stage, many a reader will be wincing in empathy!)
This spread of abrasive single-syllable words has further effects, building up a sense of urgency of voice, as the poet keeps his musician’s ear attuned to pacing in the verse.
‘dolloped out there’ hereby employs strategies used elsewhere by Gillam: another poem of place, ‘Call it that’, stretches over thirty lines, all just three words in length, in each case monosyllabic, used deftly to build up diction, cadence, environment, atmosphere.
The term dolloped may have negative connotations, with its main usage now denoting softer lumps or scoops of ingredients listed in recipes: cream, jam or sauce… Gillam’s choice of word aims to evoke a seaside location, harsh in texture to the body’s senses, as well as on a language level, with the surface of islands offshore resembling dollops of sand or concrete, as the poet has divulged: hard, sharp, rough, abrasive, injurious.
The poet is also pleased to admit he purposefully repeats a simple word like ‘once’ in our villanelle here, in pursuit of various effects on different levels: such a word echoes not only ‘one’ but also ‘walked’; likewise, it gives a sense of monosyllabic finality to the pacing of respective line-endings; yet it is powerful and succinct in its ambiguity too, suggesting not only a singularity of experience, but an occasion from the past as well.
As poetry of place, this piece names Michaelmas, Breaksea and Mistaken as islands, all rocky. Again taking on a musical air, the poetry builds up variations on a theme akin to some sort of jazz — ‘yes, you walked one, bled on one, once’ morphs into ‘you bled on one, walked one, once’, and then shifts again into ‘you walking, you bleeding, once’.
While Kevin Gillam cleverly gives variety to sonic texture through invoking such simple changes in the sequencing of words that need to be repeated, he has made another significant decision here as well, as a further authorial choice.
For a second plain but vital word recurs across those three variations above: ‘you’ — such a use of the second person in creative writing can be underpinned by varying impulses, achieving different effects, not least by making the audience feel included.
As readers, we may speculate about opposing possibilities: in a scenario appearing to depict lived experience, maybe the character involved truly was another individual — this poem may then be read as a critique of foolhardiness at ‘the unseen tip’ of danger.
Equally, some writers will admit to using ‘you’ in talking about themselves, so as to help depersonalise uncomfortable scenarios, creating a distance, perhaps self-protectively.
In a larger dialogue supporting the drafting of this appraisal, Kevin has made a striking disclosure which he is happy to have shared, endorsing being ‘transparent’, even if it alters his audience’s sense of real-life events that have given rise to ‘dolloped out there’.
It turns out that the truth here lies in the centre — a younger Kevin Gillam was involved, on the spot, on Mistaken Island; yet so was a friend: all the same, we find ‘you’; not ‘us’.
In fact, our winner of various poetry prizes has gone so far as to share an illuminating observation about his own practice, both as a writer and as a mentor for aspiring poets:
My use of second person is something I always consider — it adds a level of proximity to the writing similar to an actor being filmed. As a poetry tutor I hear/ read many poems written in first person without any thought for the alternatives.
Also via appealing to the senses, cinematically, and on a tactile level too, ‘dolloped out there’ makes us part of things, as readers, letting us feel that pain ourselves, in bare feet, duly made to bleed, through rough contact with shell and rock, granite and scree.
In a seascape where a beacon has been pivotal to ensuring safety from shipwreck, the poetry gives a poignant indication of decline over time: ‘remainders, middle pinned by lighthouse,/ eye closed over now, drab reminders’ — indeed, these are sad ‘retrievals’.
From a voice intent on sounding jagged, this not only lacks a sense of flow by choice — it also hints at a threat of breaking, as if choking with emotion in itself, thanks to loss.
Gillam’s mastery of language shows through all the more in the linkage he offers from sound to meaning — between ‘remainders’ and ‘reminders’ — at start and end here.
He personifies the disbanded lighthouse to heartbreaking effect: ‘eye closed over now’ suggests a black eye from a punch to a human face, left swollen, bruised, unseeing.
In a modernist adaptation, Gillam still offers language that may be at home in King Lear, archaic in diction, scratchy in its echoed c sounds: ‘t’was rock and hell’s arc of scree’.
Further indications of a deft hand with poetics show through when rearrangements of words in repeated phrasings are built around a framework of caesuras in mid-line.
The music of the poem is augmented all the more by the addition of other punctuated breaks, not necessarily balancing neatly as if yoked over a central point, but at times occurring earlier or later as well, with a host of commas employed (even though an abundance of such punctuation may not suit the preferences of every reader or writer).
***
A better ‘scheme’ was clearly needed, when young — more respectful to ‘Southern’s wash’ — rather than recklessly venturing out to rocky islands on the edge of this ocean, with plans not extending to footwear, being ‘all map’, paying a price in pain and blood.
In developing this evocative re-assessment of youthful folly, ‘dolloped out there’ builds up momentum through regularly making sharp jumps between terse phrases (akin to another poem by Kevin — published in Meanjin — which sits quite closely in parallel).
This adaptive villanelle creates a sense of urgency not to be found in work fleshed out by formulaic ‘fillers’, as George Macbeth suspected were in play with Dylan Thomas.
Our poet conjures a level of narrative in a verse-form Mark Strand and Eavan Boland see as defying storytelling, while his work still resounds emotively as they would admire.
Kevin Gillam has been adroit in using a poetic sub-genre that is haunting at best, yet can be limiting in scope, due to a traditional call for repetition: in crafting an insistent voice, varied in language, his musicality captures us in ear and eye, heart and mind.
In closing, ‘dolloped out there’ deserves its multi-pronged profile in publication, wistful in evoking error and regret, recounting challenges from youth, in a tough sea-based spot, ‘drab’ in ‘late autumn’, off the coast at Albany, so fraught with its own history in whaling.
Rodney Williams
Editor
Catchment — Poetry of Place
Baw Baw Arts Alliance
Gunaikurnai country
West Gippsland, Victoria